In the field of information there has been a general focus on taking individual pieces of information and in some way grouping them. A subset of these information groupings could be defined as systems, which may feature parts that are interacting or interrelated. There has been a lack of focus however on trying to help individuals to understand such systems through the use of standardized, flexible, and individualized system creation, management, and communication. Furthermore, there has not been a focus on creating a system communication approach to compete with current communication methods both in scope and efficiency (e.g. documents, spreadsheets, websites, microblogging). There is however an ever increasing need for people to better understand systems to help secure jobs, civic governance and leadership, and communicate well in an age of increasingly abundant, yet fragmented, information.
Some literature relates generally to providing an automatic hierarchical scheme using temporal, graphics visualization, and entropic characteristics. These programs may allow for a computer-based system to help organize data, but do not attempt to intensively involve a human being in making grouping decisions or to help in education, training, and research.
Other literature relates generally to having certain people group and structure knowledge with computer-based systems. These knowledge structures may be either hierarchies or community matrices. To initiate and continue the creation of such knowledge groups, an expert or a knowledge community must be involved. As a result, such literature does not help to allow a mass of people to organize around subjects that matter individually to them, and then reach out to one another, as desired, to help further their individual analysis. In other words, such literature does not provide a non-expert form of system analysis or a self-assembling network of people.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0049692 relates generally to gaining knowledge by leveraging groups of people and documents. However, a standardized structure for the documents is not described. Furthermore, only a “cluster of knowledge” is described and there is no attempt to create individual elements of knowledge nor share information in terms of individual elements or collection of elements. Also, there is also no attempt to convert the “cluster of knowledge” format to any other format. Further, there is an emphasis on sharing knowledge within organizations, and the organizations developing “critical axes” for the knowledge sharing.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0184481 relates generally to defining relationships between authors and objects. There is an attempt to define people based on the information they provide, and how they share common information. However there is no attempt to create an environment in which systems are shared or created in a standardized format.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,014, relates generally to retaining the context of citations. There is no focus on system information.
Generally, there are similarities among the ways in which knowledge has been traditionally structured for describing a system. In research for example, an inductive or deductive approach is usually employed. Inductive approaches may begin with concrete data (e.g. observations) and move on to abstract notions (e.g. hypothesis), while deductive approaches proceed vice versa. An example of an inductive approach may be referred to as coding, which may include a progression of raw data, codes, categories, and concepts. Furthermore, beyond research, there have been traditions within project management and business theory. Business theory often connects objectives, strategies, tactics, and regular work activities, with variations including process control objectives, process control strategies, process control loops, and process control objects. Project management may use a concept called work breakdown structure to define a progression of project, control accounts, work packages, and activities. Business theory and project management deal with coordinating a number of people, however ultimately one user must be responsible for developing and understanding the overall plan. As a result, there is still a single-user focus.
In information retrieval, graphs are often used to describe nodes and connections between the nodes. From this mathematical concept, there have been numerous applications, some on the Internet. Algorithms like PageRank™ and Graph Search™ have been used to describe nodes as either websites or people respectively, with connections being characteristics or links respectively.
There are also a number of diagram forms in use by society in general. Tree diagrams offer a hierarchical scheme, by starting at a node and either branching downward or radially outward. Semantic networks work by defining nodes as concepts and relationships. Semantic network concepts and relationships may be free form, where every type of concept and relationship potentially exists within one semantic network. Argument maps may include a visual representation of an argument. Argument maps may have rules for development, and may include a main contention, supporting statements, and contradicting statements. Mental models may represent how someone understands an element of the real world. Nomological networks may represent concepts and their observable manifestations. Topic maps may include a form of concept map that is standardized. Such standardization rigidly uses topics, associations, and occurrences.
Mind Mapping and Concept Mapping software exists which relates to the aforementioned diagrams. These software products tend to use similar diagrams focusing on individual and group creation. They do not however use a standardized data organization format, are not minimalist in approach, and do not facilitate streamlined or efficient reading. Due to a lack of standardization, the searching and conversion capabilities of such software is limited.
In the United States pharmaceutical industry, there is a focus on confirming the quality of drugs through following approved procedures and quality assurance, often called validation. The validation of a computer system may involve checking what the computer algorithm does relative to an expected result taken from an approved design document. If there is an error, often an error protocol may be followed to complete the validation.
The expansion of burst communication (e.g. tweets, status updates, texting, microblogging, some forms of emails) has significantly impacted the way people communicate with one another. They stand in contrast with more traditional communication methods (e.g. essays, reports, poems) that often take more time to develop and communicate more complex ideas.